


Fires on Titan

by aph_pasta



Series: Que Será, Será [4]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gen, not really a happy fic, scifi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:13:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23980615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aph_pasta/pseuds/aph_pasta
Summary: "Captain Linden... we lost contact with the Huygens spacecraft."
Series: Que Será, Será [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1350040
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3
Collections: Hetalia Scifi





	Fires on Titan

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gnostic_heretic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gnostic_heretic/gifts).



> Wow this is about a year overdue. Better late than never, I guess. This was for a little sci-fi exchange with Ivan and he drew some beautiful art to go with The Multiverse Theory. I loved getting to experiment with a new character I'd never written about before, and I hope you all enjoy the fic!

The ship shuddered, leaping up and hurtling down, again and again. Red lights flashed and an alarm howled into the blackness. The ship’s passengers braced themselves, tucking their legs against their chests and pressing their hands to the backs of their heads. One struggled to strap an oxygen mask over her face before snapping into position. Another alarm began, a mechanical voice repeating, “the radiation shell has been breached. The radiation shell has been breached.” The ship began falling in a spiral, metal screaming as speed picked up and screws began to snap. There was the pop of an explosion, then another one. 

\----

“Captain Linden?”

“Copy.”

There was a long pause and a faint whirring as the message transmitted, beaming x-band waves deep into space, where they bounced from DSN to DSN, until they reached the Mars base. Silence, then, after a long time, the whirring began again, and a message sent ten minutes ago came through her headset.

“We lost contact with the Huygens spacecraft. You’re stationed closest, can you check on them?”

“Yes sir,” Eliska replied. She turned on four of her ship’s twelve miniboosters and started to steer to her left, dipping under the dusty grey layer of Saturn’s rings. She tilted her ship side to side, dodging chunks of ice and rock. The moons flew by her and she aimed for the largest one. It took some time to drop into orbit around it, but she quickly noticed pillars of smoke rising from the moon’s north pole.

Eliska dropped lower and lower, flying around to survey the damage. She couldn’t wait for instructions from her commanders, it would take too long to relay them. She was trained for situations like this, when all she had were her wits.

There was a smooth patch of ice a few hundred feet from the ship’s wreckage, free of the telltale jagged cracks of water lying just beneath. Eliska landed there, skidding forward violently until the axelike hooks on the bottom of her ship caught in the ice. She strapped an oxygen mask onto her face, and quickly zipped up the top half of her insulwrap, which had been tied around her waist like a jacket. The ship didn’t need to depressurize in the planet’s thick methane atmosphere, so she quickly opened the stairwell and jumped out, running towards the crash.

There were only a few weak fires still licking at the burnt, twisted ship. The cold had put the rest out. The ice was splattered with blood in some places, covered in shards of glass and metal in others. 

Eliska slowly circled around, scanning for any signs of survivors. She was about to turn to a particularly deep gouge in the ice when she heard someone yell, “What the fuck? Are you just gonna leave me here?”

She quickly turned around and ran over, reaching out to help a young woman struggling to pull herself out of the wreckage. Her oxygen mask had been put on haphazardly, and the vitals panel on her suit was split open down the middle, exposing ripped wires all down her chest. 

The woman gingerly stood up, wobbling a little on her feet. She grabbed a fistful of her long hair and forcefully blew out the few glowing embers still burning it. There was a streak of black soot on her chin, and under that was a long gash caked with blood.

“Are there any other survivors?” Eliska asked, pretending she hadn’t just been cussed at. Or at least, rationalizing it, because after all this woman had just been in a terrible crash.

The woman turned around and stared at the wreckage for a few moments, then turned back. “No. No one made it.”

Eliska furrowed her brow. “Did you check?”

“No. I just know.”

“Oh,” was all she could say. Then, after a little thinking, “I should really look-”

“No. There’s no point. I was in a different part of the ship. We took a nosedive, if someone survived through that they won’t live much longer after you find them.”

Eliska had to agree. Trying to save them would just make them suffer for longer, and she would be expending valuable resources on a lost cause. “We should go back to my ship. I need to let BaseComm know what I found. There’s bound to be an investigation.”

The woman nodded briskly and began limping towards the smaller ship off in the distance. Eliska followed slightly behind her, reading the back of her flight jacket. As they trudged over the ice, she asked, “Arlovskaya. Is that your first name, or your last name?”

“Last name,” she mumbled, and Eliska thought she heard her add something like ‘but what’s it to you’. 

“So what’s your first name?”

The woman crossed her arms and pursed her lips. “Right now is really not the time for pleasantries.”

“I- no, I need to report to BaseComm that I found you. I need your name for that.”

The woman huffed and just kept walking in silence. When she reached the ship, she slipped on the steps and just barely caught herself on the railing. Eliska reached out to help her, but her hand was swatted away. With some difficulty, the woman got back on her feet and painstakingly went up the steps and into the belly of the ship. Eliska joined her and closed the hatch, then pressed her fingertip against a scanner. The ship awoke, sealing the hatch with a smacking sound and whooshing oxygen in through vents. A smooth, robotic voice announced, “Welcome back, Captain. You have a new message from Commander Irons at BaseComm-” the voice faded out and there were two beeps, then a new voice crackled in, cutting in and out at times. “We’re going to assume you proceeded with standard protocol. Our satellite sensors still don’t have any signal from the ship, so we are going to send an investigation team to the site. Please give us a status update as soon as you can.”

Eliska turned to the woman and gestured toward one of the seats in the cockpit. “Sit down and buckle in. I’ll deal with your injuries as soon as we’re out of Saturn’s orbit.” She sat down in the other seat, pulling her oxygen mask down to hang around her neck and pressing a button on the side of the yoke with her thumb. “This is Captain Linden to BaseComm. Repeat- Captain Linden to BaseComm. I have one survivor-” 

She gestured to the woman, who took a moment before muttering, “Natalya Arlovskaya.”

“It appears the ship took a nosedive and there are no other survivors worth using resources on. My clock is saying it is 3:48 a.m. at BaseComm headquarters, so mark down that at 3:50 a.m. we will be lifting off with our trajectory set towards Mars. Over.” She took her finger off the button, and set her palm down on a pane of glass. The ship’s engines started to hum, louder and louder until it was a steady roar. Just as the clock on the windshield projected 3:50, she pulled back on the yoke and the ship began to climb steadily into the blackness of space.

\----

“Tell them to cancel the investigation team.”

Eliska glanced over at Natalya, who was staring out the window, a strange look on her face. “What?”

“You heard me. Tell them to cancel the investigation.”

This time, Eliska took her hands off the yoke, unclipped her seatbelt, and turned all the way around to face Natalya. “Do you understand that attempting to obstruct justice is a crime, and if you are found guilty, you will also be charged with the unlawful deaths of every single member of your crew?”

“Yeah,” she replied, as though it was the most obvious, mundane thing in the world.

“Do you even care how much you would put at risk?”

“No, not really,” Natalya shrugged.

Eliska swallowed and folded her hands in her lap. “Did you-”

“No.”

They sat in tense silence, Eliska watching Natalya scowl at the floor and avoid her eyes.

“I know what went wrong with the ship. I’m the engineer. I know everything about that ship, and I know the engine was clogged with debris that would cause it to fail when we entered the atmosphere. I told the captain- he refused to abort the mission.”

Eliska reached out, gently placing her hand on Natalya’s knee. The woman shoved it away, still scowling.

“I don’t want your pity. I know that in part I’m to blame. I’ll deal with this myself.”

“Space travel is dangerous. Accidents happen, and you shouldn’t make yourself crazy thinking you’re at fault. There were a lot of moving parts and sometimes these things happen even-”

She was cut off by Natalya looking up and meeting her eyes, her jaw clenched into a serious expression. “I knew something was wrong. The captain was a headstrong bitch, and I should have kicked him out of his seat and aborted the mission myself. I am at fault here.”

Eliska frowned, searching Natalya’s troubled eyes. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, not really sure what to say. The woman seemed determined that she had caused the accident. She turned away, feeling discomfort radiating from Natalya, and focused back on the star-studded blanket of velvety space that spread before them. She spotted Jupiter off in the distance, a large, shining sphere. She tried to get her mind to wander somewhere else, but she was brought back again and again to the woman next to her. 

“If you want some privacy, there’s a curtain to divide the ship, and you can borrow my mat and blankets,” Eliska eventually said. She couldn’t think clearly with Natalya sitting there, she was just too concerned about her. It made sense that she felt bad about the accident, it must have been quite traumatizing. What didn’t make sense was that she decided it was her fault and didn’t want an official investigation. 

Natalya unclipped her seatbelt and got up, walking to the back of the ship. Eliska heard the swoosh of the back curtain closing and she resisted the temptation to look back at her. She had to focus on flying the plane.

\----

Eliska heard a tearing sound and then a soft muttering of a few expletives. She cautiously got up and opened the curtain, finding Natalya sitting on the floor, holding a knife and surrounded by pieces of burnt blonde hair.

“Oh…” she said softly, taking a step back to assess the situation. Natalya’s scowl quickly returned and she grabbed the bottom of the curtain, pulling it closed again. Eliska pulled at the middle of the curtain in a strange vertical tug-of-war, before eventually opening it again. She stepped inside, then knelt down beside Natalya.

“I thought you wanted privacy.”

“Yes, but I also want my ship to stay clean,” Eliska paused, knowing this wasn’t the time to lecture about manners. She pulled a drawer out from the wall, carefully removing a first aid kit. It crinkled as she opened it up, rummaging through until she found a small pair of scissors. They weren’t meant for hair, but they’d have to do. Eliska sat down, crossing her legs and gently touching Natalya’s shoulder with her fingertips. “Sit still, and trust me. I’m just going to cut your hair.” 

Natalya stiffened, but eventually set the knife down on the floor. She grit her teeth as she heard the scissors snipping at her hair. “You better not fuck up,” she growled.

Eliska kept silent, pressing her lips together in concentration. The only sound between them was the gentle snip-snip of the scissors, and the Natalya’s occasional shifting on top of the floor mat.

The last bit of blonde hair fell to the floor, and Eliska carefully combed her fingers through Natalya’s hair. Before, it had reached her waist. Now it sat at the middle of her back, less jagged than what had been done with the knife, but still not perfectly professional. A burning smell filled the ship and Eliska carefully stood up, brushing pieces of singed hair off of her lap. She’d sweep later. 

“Sit back down,” Natalya mumbled, her voice small and less guarded than before. Eliska complied, and the woman leaned against her, her freshly cut hair hiding her face. She was shaking, and without looking, Eliska could tell she was crying.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, feeling both relieved that Natalya was no longer putting up a cold front and saddened at knowing how much emotional pain the woman was in. “You did what you could.”

Natalya hesitated before nodding, then moved closer to the woman, allowing her to wrap an arm around her.

“I’ve been patrolling for years,” Eliska whispered, sorrowful pride in her voice. “I’ve seen plenty of things like this. It doesn’t get easier, and everyone blames themselves, but you also can’t let this consume you. We’re all human, we all make mistakes. But you have to also look around and see what humans can do. We terraformed a planet, for heaven’s sake. We took a dusty old rock and turned it green with trees and blue with oceans. Mistakes were made and people were lost along the way, but look at the outcome. Sure, you made a mistake- your captain made a mistake. But sometimes those mistakes have to be made so we can learn from them. Don’t beat yourself up because you’re helping to make history.”


End file.
